WORLD WAR II, BETWEEN THE COVERS

War’s history is an enduring presence on best-seller list

Mace is also among the 15 Leathernecks featured in “Voices of the Pacific” (Berkley Caliber, $27.95), edited by Adam Makos with Marcus Brotherton. These “Voices” can be confusing, as we hear a fragment of one Marine’s tale and then another, but readers who persist will be rewarded with vivid, unvarnished stories.

Makos — with co-author Larry Alexander — uses a straightforward narrative approach in “A Higher Call” (Berkley Caliber, $29.95). The events leading to, and following, a fateful December 1943 encounter between a B-17 bomber and a Messerschmitt raise fascinating questions about mercy and morality under tense, unforgiving conditions.

Denise Kiernan promises an “untold story” with “The Girls of Atomic City” (Touchstone, $27) and she delivers. The book pulls back the curtain on the secret wartime world of Oak Ridge, Tenn., where 75,000 people — many of them women lured from other cities with the promise of steady work — helped to enrich uranium for a new kind of war-ending bomb. One of the great subplots here is the lengths taken to keep the workers in the dark about just what they were building.

Two harrowing tales of escape and survival during the war get thrilling retellings in Cate Lineberry’s “The Secret Rescue” (Little, Brown and Co., $27) and Bob Welch’s “Resolve” (Berkley Caliber, $26.95). Lineberry’s story is about 26 American nurses and medics trapped behind enemy lines for more than two months after their transport plane crashed in Albania in November 1943. Welch’s is about Clay Conner Jr., a resourceful Indiana native who hid and fought in the jungles of the Philippines for three years after the Japanese overran the island in April 1942.

“Big Week” (Berkley Caliber, $26.95) and “The Last Battle” (Da Capo Press, $25.99) suffer from similar problems: Both are front-loaded with detailed accounts of logistics, chains of command and strategy, delivered with all the drama of a Pentagon white paper. When Bill Yenne finally gets to his “Week,” the February 1944 air raids that crippled Germany’s aircraft factories, the story comes to life. Readers also have to combat boredom as Stephen Harding prepares them for his astonishing “Battle,” a stranger-than-fiction episode in May 1945, when U.S. and German troops united to rescue French hostages from a castle held by fanatical SS troopers.

Dull storytelling wasn’t a problem for war correspondents Walter Cronkite, Andy Rooney, A.J. Liebling, Homer Bigart and Hal Boyle. Their courage in getting close enough to the action to tell America how the war against Germany was going shines through in Timothy M. Gay’s “Assignment to Hell” (NAL Caliber paperback, $16).

Their dispatches were the first draft of history — but not the last, as the river of books about World War II flows ever onward.

Staff writers Peter Rowe and John Wilkens are the authors of “The Legacy of World War II,” a monthly series in the U-T.